Mar. 19 - Sometimes, an old idea can seem new again. That's what's happening in health care, where choice is making a comeback.

Employers nationwide are thinking about getting out of the business of selecting coverage for their employees, says Denver health-care consultant Ralph Pollock. Instead, they'll give employees a chunk of money, called a defined contribution, and let the employees buy their own health care.

"We've known this for years, we're going to move toward a defined contribution," he says. Xerox Corp. looks likely to be the first to move completely to such a system, Pollock says. The move wouldn't necessarily raise employees' costs, but it would dramatically raise their level of responsibility.

While no Colorado employer has gone quite that far, an increasing number of small-business employees statewide are getting a taste of things to come through a Denverbased nonprofit cooperative that exists to provide choice where none existed before.

The Alliance has a program it calls CHIP (Cooperative for Health Insurance Purchasing) that consists of four HMOs - Kaiser Permanente, Aetna US Healthcare, HMO Colorado and PacifiCare.

Because the four plans in CHIP represent 96 percent of Denver-area primary-care doctors, employers that choose CHIP don't have to listen to employees gripe about having selected the wrong plan, says Mark Zumtobel, an agent with Combined Brokers in Lakewood.

Janelle Conan, the administrator at Frontier Glass, an auto, commercial and residential glass business in Englewood, says the eight-person company used to switch health plans every few years as premiums fluctuated, causing paperwork headaches for everybody.

It signed onto CHIP in 1996 because - you guessed it - "We were able to give our employees a choice," she says.

The Alliance is the closest thing that exists to the defined-contribution world foreseen by Pollock, who gets his insurance through the group. The trick, he notes, is to balance the independence consumers crave with the buying power that comes only with numbers.

The Alliance can't do anything about rising costs, CEO Tom Rockers concedes. CHIP clients are paying more for their coverage just like everyone else. What it can do is relieve employers of a lot of the grief they encounter from employees who feel they've been railroaded into a plan they don't like. Says Rockers: "I think it is a precursor to how insurance will be purchased."

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